Sagittarian Domain

Oren Ambarchi had one day in the studio to complete Sagittarian Domain. The album, which consists of one 33-minute track featuring the Australian musician and a three-piece string section, is a gigantic standoff between restriction and freedom.

The best music doesn't always happen by design. There are innumerable stories of musicians stumbling across moments of inspiration while fooling around in the studio, although usually these are happy accidents that merely serve to flesh out a much bigger picture. Australian musician Oren Ambarchi, currently in the midst of an extremely productive run of albums, simply let that kind of impulsive thinking dominate his entire work mode when putting together Sagittarian Domain. He admitted in a recent interview that he had "no idea" how the record was going to pan out when he went into Melbourne's Sing Sing studio to record it. At the center of Sagittarian Domain, which consists of one 33-minute track, is a gigantic standoff between restriction and freedom. Ambarchi had just one day in the studio to complete the project, pushing a severe time limit up against his wide-open approach to recording.

Fitting that distinction to his music and method, essentially setting two opposing forces in motion, is exactly the kind of counterintuitive approach that has served Ambarchi well over the years. At this point in his career, the word "drone" is still commonly affixed as a descriptor to his art, even though he's more than capable of turning any expectations foisted on him inside out. On Sagittarian Domain there's a great spring in his step, a sense of playfulness, a feeling of open-ended journey. Krautrock comes to mind, just for the sheer driving repetition scooped into the heart of the track. But this isn't the taut playing of Neu! or the percussion-heavy raptures of Can. This is something altogether more baggy, set in a place where the slackness at its core acts as a conduit for all the ideas siphoned into it. There's almost a jazzy tinge to the drumming, like Klaus Dinger suddenly freed from all the no-fuss discipline he brought to his work.

The centerpiece "Knots" from Audience of One found Ambarchi matching abstract bursts of noise with giddy strings, a thread he partially picks up again here. Working with a three-piece string section-- violin, viola, and cello-- he allows the song to warp and crumple in unexpected ways, pushing it toward bombast at times. Certainly there's a vast step-up in energy as he gradually affords his accompanying musicians space. By the time "Sagittarian Domain" passes the 20-minute mark, we're in a different world from the low-key synth and guitar textures that abutted his circuitous playing in the first half of the song. The cello feels like a dark energy wrapping itself around the track, set in stark simultaneous resistance to the violin pushing everything up toward the sky. It's that feeling of unlikely contiguous variants once again, all feeding off an irregular force derived from Ambarchi's inclination for just trying out stuff to see where it leads him.

It's appropriate, then, that Sagittarian Domain lands in a place at its end that couldn't possibly have been predicted from its beginning. Many artists who use repetition as a framework play the game of build and release, stretching the loud-quiet-loud aesthetic across vast plains of land. Ambarchi does that to an extent here, but he relinquishes hold at the end by sucking out most of his own playing and allowing the string section a full five minutes to stretch. If the main part of the song offers a chance to blank out the world by getting lost in pure rhythm, here he gently bumps it back to reality, a sad, bruised, lonely coda to a track that never felt like it was in the same orbit as that kind of feeling. Music often works well by building natural bridges between things-- a verse sliding into a chorus, lyrics that equate sadness with melancholia, bursts of guitar that make euphoria and aggression collide into one another-- but here Ambarchi shows how sharp about-turns and starkly dissimilar contrasts can be equally potent.